Title:
Information Loss in Black Holes and/or Conscious Beings?

Abstract: In 1976 Stephen Hawking proposed that information may be lost from our
universe as a pure quantum state collapses gravitationally into a black hole,
which then evaporates completely into a mixed state of thermal radiation.
Although this proposal is controversial, it is tempting to consider analogous
processes that might occur in certain theories of consciousness. For example,
one might postulate that independent degrees of freedom be ascribed to the
mental world to help explain the feeling of a correlation between one's desires
and one's choice of actions. If so, one might ask whether information in the
physical world can be lost to such postulated degrees of freedom in the mental
world. Or, one might hypothesize that the mental world can affect the physical
world by modifying the quantum action for the physical world in a
coordinate-invariant way (analogous to the alpha parameters in wormhole
theory).